


A Small Book of Designs

by gin_eater



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 03, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2019-09-01 13:26:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16766044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: Bedannibal-centric alternate season three, with the premise that Hannibal did not escape the confrontation at his home in Mizumono.





	1. The Voice of the Devil

**Author's Note:**

> I was disappointed, overall, by the third season of the show. Will Graham is not a suitable character substitute for Clarice Starling, anymore than torture portrayed as an effective homoerotic love language is a suitable thematic substitute for the perils that befall men whose insecurities compel them to underestimate and/or destroy women.
> 
> That said, I've thought a lot about how I would have liked to see the third season play out, even with the licensing restrictions that prevented the show from incorporating SotL characters and storylines, and so this is my take on that: a third season as a final season, with no Silence or Starling in sight, and closer-to-book-canon interpretations of where the characters all wind up, both psychologically and physically. Some of it will match the show; much of it will not.
> 
> In the end, they're both only fanfiction, anyway.
> 
> The main and chapter titles are/will be all lifted from the works of William Blake, with those chapters that directly correspond to certain episodes of the show retaining their identical titles. Tags may expand and alter as the story progresses.

Bedelia Du Maurier released a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding as the big bronze door swung soundlessly open on its hinges, welcoming her into a house that she hadn't honestly believed she'd ever set foot inside of again.

It was, as far as she could tell at first glance, precisely as she'd left it, with one unsurprising difference: the empty space on the coffee table in her study that she had left occupied by a flagon of her perfume.

Presuming it was now in the possession of the person -- if he could be termed as such -- to whom she had gifted it, Bedelia wondered fleetingly if he would take it with him, wherever he ended up going. Europe, she thought, or perhaps South America. Someplace with a language barrier, but not one where his physical appearance was likely to be dog-eared in the minds of whatever people he encountered.

In her mind, his own scent was keyed to a statue in Liège to which she'd made a pilgrimage the summer before she'd started med school -- a tour of European cathedrals that had been the last hurrah of an architectural history minor she'd pursued as a labor of love despite doubting, at the time, that she would ever find an opportunity to make real use of it.

Hannibal Lecter had never worn cologne that Bedelia could discern, but always carried about himself the suggestion of something cleanly earthy, something between petitgrain and opopanax, wolf-musk and wool, as more- and less-than-human as the marble-hewn Adversary upon which she'd draped the memory like the dust cloth that still obscured the chair in her home that she'd come to regard as his.

On impulse, she pulled that cloth away, and held it in her hands as she lowered herself into the seat he had occupied for one hour every Friday afternoon, almost without fail, for the seven year duration of their doctor-patient relationship.

She looked at her own chair angled opposite his, still draped, as if she were the ghost here. In a way, she supposed she was. The absence of the flagon could only confirm his intentions to make her so.

She wasn't entirely certain how she felt about that. At the time, she'd been too preoccupied with coordinating her continuing survival to process her emotions; now, she thought she might be more offended than anything, that he'd apparently believed her witless enough to stay and simply let him happen to her -- again.

 _I didn't happen to you,_ his voice sounded in her head, uncomfortably akin to that of a ventriloquist piping words into the dummy sat on his lap. _You happened. I merely arranged the opportunity for you to do so._

She could almost smell him then, the overweening son of a bitch, seeping like a miasma from the fabric beneath and behind her, as though his presence could unfurl out of the ether as a tea blossom blooms from unassuming bulb into full flower upon its submersion.

She expected it to chill her, the notion that he could be there at that very moment, watching her from the next room. She expected a sudden rush of panic, or, at the very least, a whimper of warning from the oubliette of her primal hindbrain.

But there was nothing. Not even a tingle.

Bedelia wasn't sure whether that was cause for disappointment or relief, but it had been a very long, very tiresome day, and she suspected that a sizeable slice of her mind was still airborne, riding the draught behind the 747 that had carried her here from her Connecticut hideaway, escorted by two gentlemen who had been unwilling to let her out of their sight and unable, on the government's tightfisted dime, to spring for better than business class.

Of course, she would have flown economy in a heartbeat, if it meant she could be back on a plane right now, but Jack Crawford had been grimly explicit that she remain conveniently located for the time being -- a sort of unofficial house arrest, noncompliance with which would see her facing charges of obstruction. The discordant hypocrisy of lawful blackmail.

Bedelia didn't care for Crawford. He was a cocksure CliffsNotes of a man, just clever enough to be careful of his own capacity for foolishness, but too unimaginative to ever become truly wise or wisely fearful.

Will Graham, on the other hand... Bedelia knew both less and more about him. Hannibal believed he and Will to be two of a kind, but if that were really true, Bedelia would have bet every penny of her not insignificant means that Graham would have killed him by now. A terrible thing, to have one's identity stolen; even worse to have another's identity superimposed upon one without one's consent, and Hannibal's identity was not that of a man easily moved to mercy. Ironically, had he not so severely undermined Will Graham's sense of self, he might have been more successful in achieving his goals; framing him for Hannibal's own crimes, regardless of whether that had been the doctor's original intention, could only reinforce a desire for further differentiation between the two in Graham's mind.

He'd opened Will up and forced an ear down his throat. That was, contrary to her earlier assertions, coercion. Bedelia was well-acquainted with the emotions involved in such an act, and knew them to be no more indicative of love than the addition of Rohypnol to a glass of wine. It was uncharacteristic of Hannibal to assign such crude methods an affectionate context; indeed, it was a discrepancy anomalous enough that it bordered on self-delusion.

When she hit upon it, Bedelia smiled. More than that, she laughed aloud. It was so ludicrously obvious, and had Hannibal not appeared to be above so many of the pitfalls of traditional masculinity, she might have seen it months ago.

A man of a certain age meets one younger who reminds him of himself, provoking an examination of his own life and illuminating its areas that have fallen into stagnation, thus triggering a series of increasingly desperate and disparate attempts at recapturing the elements that had comprised his own youth.

Will Graham was Hannibal Lecter's midlife crisis.

And as a result of Hannibal's monstrous ego, it was Graham -- Graham, and the unfortunate Hobbs girl -- who'd had to shoulder the brunt of the reenactment required of Hannibal's subconsciously smarting sense of his own mortality. Perhaps it _was_ affectionate, after all: he loved himself that much.

She supposed it was a point in his favor that at least he hadn't done something tacky or cliché, like purchase a motorcycle.

Shaking her head, Bedelia rose and made for the basement, leaving the dust cloth on the coffee table and Hannibal's chair uncovered.

A surprising difference, this time, when she approached her carefully curated racks of wine: a bottle of Château d'Yquem -- specifically, a vintage dating from the year of her birth -- with a card tied to its neck with a red velvet ribbon.

_Out of the strong, something sweet. --H._

Bedelia ran the pad of her thumb over the familiar handwriting, feeling the way that the press of his fountain pen had embossed the thick, creamy paper with its words. A respectful acknowledgement of defeat, or the mocking promise of a future rendezvous?

She wove the ribbon between her fingers, removed the bottle from the rack, and headed back upstairs.

The smallish television mounted to the wall in one corner of the kitchen was the only set in the house, and she'd been meaning to get rid of it for some time now, preferring, like most people in the present day, to consume most of her media through the convenience of a computer tablet.

Now, however, she wanted its background noise, something meaningless and random -- the word salad of an infomercial, or a documentary on the manufacture of crayons. Definitely not a sitcom; double-definitely not anything that tried to pass itself off as "reality."

She'd just uncorked the wine and set it on the counter to breathe, when the universe winked, and supplied her with a reality quite particular to herself, far from meaningless, far from laughter canned or live.

_"We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news, live at the scene of a grisly attack in Baltimore that has left one person dead and four others currently in serious to critical condition. Police and FBI agents responded to a call for backup at 5 Chandler Square in the affluent neighborhood of Guilford, and what awaited them inside the home was nothing short of a bloodbath."_

The camera cut to the façade of an impressive Italianate house, cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape, the silhouettes of federal and local police officers moving this way and that behind the curtains in a procedural shadow play.

The wine, Bedelia concluded, would not suffer overmuch if it was drunk prematurely.

_"Two members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a teenage girl, and two prominent Baltimore psychiatrists are among the victims of the attack. One man was shot, the other two stabbed, and a woman found outside, allegedly pushed out of a second-storey window. Sadly, the teenage girl, we've been informed, was pronounced dead at the scene; the others have been taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment. We'll bring you further details as the story unfolds, as well as updates on their conditions--"_

The anchor's cadent voice cut short as Bedelia turned off the television set, and the ensuing silence shrilled in her ears like the cry of a raptor as the pieces the press were still puzzling together quickly assembled themselves in her mind, where they resolved into a rather unanticipated picture.

She polished off her first glass and quickly poured a second.

Now, she was tingling.

* * *

It was nearly two weeks before her phone lit up with Jack Crawford's number -- time enough for wounds to close and blood to be restored, for charges to be read and filed, cells and rooms readied, the transference of bodies between hospital and homes of varying designations.

Time enough for her to have made other discoveries throughout her own home, as well: the continuing vibrancy of the herb garden occupying one kitchen wall; a valise in her bedroom containing toiletries and two changes of clothes; a fresh suit hanging neatly above a pair of polished Oxfords amidst the bare bones of her master closet.

The bastard had more than ignored her request -- he'd been using her home as a safehouse; from the look of things, had even planned for it to be his next stop following the events that had transpired at his. What would have happened, she wondered, if he had succeeded, and she had found him here upon her return? Would he have taken the opportunity to kill her then and there, or would he have dreamed up some whimsical scenario in which her life might prove more valuable to him than her death?

Naturally, Bedelia had mentioned none of these things -- not the evidence, and definitely not the musings it prompted -- to Jack Crawford. It had come to nothing, after all, the fruits of Hannibal's intentions left to wither on the vine, and Bedelia wasn't one to underestimate the value of maintaining her own shadows in which to slither about undetected.

Now, she let Crawford wait through the the rings of her cell phone until they nearly went to voicemail, and said nothing when she finally picked up.

"I take it you're aware of what's happened," he said, as unconcerned with pleasantries as she. His voice was hoarse, and not with emotion.

"Broadly," she said. "I've seen the news." The news, the newspapers, even daytime talk shows had quickly cobbled together episodes themed around spotting the psychopaths hidden amongst one's friends and family. Hannibal-fever had quickly expanded into a national epidemic, and its index case didn't even have a trial date yet.

"He's asked to speak to you."

"And if I don't wish to be spoken to?"

Crawford paused, choosing his next words carefully.

"He has _only_ asked to speak to you. He said nothing before that, and he's said nothing since, not even to his lawyer. Not even during his arraignment in the hospital."

"Where is he being held now?"

"BSHCI."

"In Will Graham's old cell?"

"No."

"He might be chattier if he was."

"He's not getting anywhere near Will Graham, in any capacity, ever again."

"Is he awake?" She didn't have to specify that it was Graham she meant.

Crawford was quiet a moment. "No, not yet. But he's stable. Healing."

"Somehow I doubt very much that either of those things are true."

"Will you see him?" Hannibal, this time. Bedelia wondered if Crawford noticed the namelessness of their back-and-forth, wondered what he thought about it, if he did.

"I will. But I wouldn't expect him to tell me anything you don't already know."

"He doesn't have to. It's not evidence we lack, or even motive, at this point."

"What do you lack, Agent Crawford?"

"I want him to open his mouth..."

"...so that you can place a bit behind his teeth. You believe a man such as he can be bridled?"

"I don't give a damn about bridling him. I want him to bite down for the last time. I want those teeth of his broken on the sweet iron."

"Sweet iron is used in horse bits to encourage salivation," she pointed out.

"It's also prone to rust," Crawford countered. "I want his mouth to rust, Doctor Du Maurier. I want the last blood he tastes to be his own."

Bedelia closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose, recalling the last time she had facilitated such a fate -- the way the esophagus seemed to suck her hand deeper as the body bucked for breath, until she could feel the heart leaping like a trout against her fingertips, like the first time she'd felt a man's excitement for her through his trousers.

"Give me an hour."

"I'll send a car."

* * *

The last time Bedelia had visited the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, it was with a not dissimilar function in mind. Like Hannibal Lecter, she largely preferred to act as the catalyst of a chain reaction: an accelerant that itself remains unaffected by whatever response it provokes. She'd sought to berth Will Graham's mind to the truth of his convictions not out of any real pity for the man or anger at what he'd been put through, but for the response those convictions would provoke in her then-newly-former patient. In light of said patient's recent behavior toward her, she'd felt well-justified in seeking to replace the blanks in the gun he was fashioning with live rounds.

Two of those rounds, Jack Crawford told her on the steps of the institution, had indeed found themselves buried in Hannibal's left lung and thigh, the latter of which had clipped his femoral artery. He'd managed to tourniquet the wound with his belt before he bled out, but, weakened and gasping, he'd made it no further than the dining room. Crawford guessed he'd been trying for the back door; Bedelia wondered if it wasn't simply where he'd chosen to lie, undoubtedly registering the hopelessness of his quandary and unable to resist the black humor of the presentation.

"Agent Burke" -- her driver -- "will bring you to Quantico when you're done," Crawford told her at the first gate.

He was still anemic-looking, silver stubble curling on his jaw above the thick white bandage on his neck, eyes bloodshot and rimmed with shadows plump as thunderclouds, leavened more with lightning than with tears.

Bedelia said nothing, but turned toward the gate, jaw clinching at the abrasive buzz that signaled its unlocking.

Hannibal's cell was deeper within the institution than Will Graham's had been, its security augmented with a stout nylon net stretched just further than arm's length beyond the bars.

No guard or orderly announced her, but she knew he would hear her coming, knew that the rhythmic clicking of her heels on the concrete floor would be as familiar to him as the opening notes of a sonata.

And so she found him, standing erect as a dancer despite his recent injuries, in the middle of his cell, with his hands folded politely behind his back. His eyes brightened when he saw her, the same as they always had, and the small smile playing about the corners of his mouth projected genuine gratification at her presence.

"Hello, Hannibal."

"Hello, Bedelia."

It always felt strange whenever he addressed her so informally. His accent lent a melodious quality to her given name that was uncommon in her day-to day life. She liked it. She was not pleased with him at present but, undeterred by her better angels, she still liked this devil no longer in disguise.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"I suffer no pain that is not alleviated by your company. I would offer you a seat, but I'm afraid my captors favor a code of conduct that places little stock in common courtesy."

His voice had a slight metallic rasp, probably from disuse, poetically a ferric remnant of the pneumothorax that had helped to fell him.

"Thank you, anyway. I'm fine."

"Are you? When last we saw one another, you seemed...troubled."

"Cautious," she said, "would be the word I'd use."

"And now?"

"Less cautious than is my wont, but still less reckless than you."

"The charges leveled against me would indicate I acted with a controlled use of force."

"I disagree."

"It's why you left." It was neither question nor rebuke; merely an acknowledgement of fact.

"You attempted to insert me into a relationship in which you were well aware I had no wish to become involved. Nor for you to become involved, for that matter. And now we both stand surrounded by the consequences of your unwillingness to listen."

"Yes," he admitted, which wasn't in itself surprising -- Hannibal was, by necessity, dishonest, but by design, he was unfailingly sincere.

No, the surprise came immediately thereafter: "Which is why I would like to resume our therapy."

Bedelia made no attempt to prevent the habitually subtle movements of her face from transmitting suspicion.

"To what point and purpose," she demanded, "other than your own?"

A measured gesture at the bars between them. "I am insane. The purpose is yours, _Doctor_ Du Maurier."

Bedelia swallowed, tonguing her frenulum, considering.

"I lack the appropriate skills to continue your treatment."

"I never found you to be lacking."

"Didn't you? Carnations and cloves, Hannibal."

"Aldehydes, bergamot, rosewood and amber," he volleyed back. "While I detect that today you are determinedly unperfumed, your scent is a gift I will always treasure."

"You haven't much to treasure in here."

His eyes didn't waver from hers, head fondly cocked, the electric charm that had made many a socialite's fur crackle in full effect. "I have all the treasure I require."

Bedelia closed her eyes briefly in lieu of rolling them.

"I would apologize if my departure left you without a suitable means of recourse for your compulsions, but as I recall, neither my therapy nor my advice ever dissuaded you from acting upon them."

"Through no fault in your abilities, I assure you. Every person has an intrinsic responsibility for their own life."

"Do you take responsibility for your life, Hannibal?"

"Yes. But I do not take responsibility for anyone else's."

He bored into her with his prairie-level gaze, managing, in that singular way he had, to appear at once vulnerable and menacing.

He took a single step toward the bars -- toward her. Last time, that had been a gesture of intimidation; this time, it was evocative of a plea.

This time, she did not take a step back.

"I am asking for your help, Bedelia. Will you help me?"


	2. A Memorable Fancy

There was a chair, next time -- two, in fact, as an official session warranted use of the asylum's privacy room. Hannibal sat with his usual nonchalance, as though the sturdy chains binding his ankles to the chair bolted to the floor and the straightjacket hugging his arms to his sides were all there of his own accord.

Bedelia, unencumbered, nonetheless mimicked the rigidity of his posture, her back finishing-school-straight, fingers laced atop the table over the softcover Moleskine notebook and felt-tipped pen she'd been permitted.

As it was highly unorthodox for the psychiatric care of an institutionalized patient -- especially one with Hannibal Lecter's coveted pedigree and media interest -- to be overseen by a private, unaffiliated physician, Jack Crawford had agreed to intervene on her behalf with BSHCI's acting director (Frederick Chilton being still indisposed by a packed schedule of reconstructive surgeries).

"You wanted him to open his mouth, Agent Crawford," Bedelia had reminded him. "He opens his mouth for me."

Crawford was amenable, as long as she consented to testify about whatever that came out of that mouth in court.

She had, and spent the following three days in performance of an insipid bureaucratic choreography between herself, Crawford, the acting director, a heel-nipping woman from the Inspector General's office, the judge assigned to Hannibal's case, and lawyers for both the prosecution and the defense, until she at last found her on-again patient studying her face from across the table -- or rather, the perimeter of her face, her hair having been pulled back into a low, chic ponytail, and tied with a red velvet ribbon. Bedelia knew he was analyzing the strip of fabric's semiotic possibilities: the airing of a grievance? Forgiveness of his trespasses?

"Did you enjoy the wine?" he asked.

"I did, thank you."

He smiled, and a minute inclination of his head was all that was required to express his great delight at having pleased her. Then he sat back, and began their session in earnest.

"I've been thinking about anniversaries. Birthdays. Revolutions."

Bedelia opened her notebook and uncapped her pen. "Threads of meaning woven through the fabric of time," she observed.

"Punctures of the same needle through different pockets of existence," he agreed.

"The same needle," she said, "but one that does not necessarily embroider the same pattern on every pocket."

"Like a repurposed heirloom. A precious stone taken from an earring and set into an engagement band."

"Will Graham did not accept your proposal."

The pain in his eyes was exquisite, for the microsecond it was visible: a flickering fresco of rage illuminated by a single votive candle of grief.

"Will Graham believes he changed me, as I changed him."

"In what way did he change you?"

Hannibal's mouth twitched into a small, grim smile.

"A redefinition of freedom."

Bedelia took him in as she would the interior of an ancient church, walking a slow circle in her mind, allowing the secrets of its structure to shimmer in and out of focus with the shifting angles of the light, neither seeking nor needing to pry the beams apart in order to discern their functions.

"Birthdays themselves are revolutionary events -- cyclical, encouraging of a redefinition of one's place in the world, if not a redefinition of one's self."

"A feast following a harvest of years, and yet one that celebrates one's avoidance of having thus far been reaped."

"Or ripped," Bedelia pointed out.

"Or ripped," he concurred, his smile returning, more cheerful this time. "How will you celebrate your next birthday, Doctor Du Maurier?"

Bedelia smiled back. "I still have a number of weeks to decide. God willing."

"A fickle thing, the will of God."

"Is that not why the Devil found him wanting?"

"The Devil found Man wanting, not God. It was God's insistence that he bow to Man at which he balked. An act of obeisance of which he felt only God was worthy."

"The Devil was an angel, and as such an embodiment of God's will. How, then, were his actions the result of a choice, when he lacked the very thing that would have enabled him to make one?"

"The Devil is God's own self-doubt."

"Divine blasphemy?"

"Sacred profanity." A clever grin. "Holy shit."

Bedelia regarded him evenly. "Do you ever doubt yourself, Hannibal?"

"Not as others do."

"Not even when mistaken? Things don't always play out in accordance with your direction."

"Where would the fun be if they did? A lack of omniscience is not synonymous with doubt."

"Sometimes that's precisely what it is, O ye of little faith."

He squinted in amusement at the sally, but shifted in such a way that she suspected he would have splayed his hands on the surface of the table, had he been able to -- a pianist's habit, denoting a preoccupation with some internal arrangement.

"No faith," he said. "No free Will. No person suit. Where, then, would you say that leaves me?"

Bedelia gave the question due consideration, weighing it on her judgement's shrewd scales.

"In a garden," she offered after a moment, "freshly molted, and making for a tree."

Hannibal stared at her, through her, eyes fixed on some point -- in his mind or hers, she couldn't say -- as distant as Heaven was wide.

The tip of his tongue darted out, tasting the air and the bow of his lips, and Bedelia became acutely aware of the way the forked ends of the velvet ribbon grazed the margins of her neck like fingertips.

* * *

"He's still alive, isn't he?"

Will Graham's voice was low and scratchy, his throat still raw from the tubes that had kept him adequately fed and well-oxygenated through his brain's seventeen-day slog back to sentience.

The bleakly ireful expression worn by Jack Crawford, seated in a chair at his bedside, was answer enough.

"Abigail?" Graham asked.

Now, Jack looked just plain bleak. "I'm sorry, Will."

Graham closed his eyes, exhaled a breath at length.

"Alana?"

"She'll probably be in traction for the better part of six months, but she'll recover. More or less."

"She's strong."

"Yes, she is."

Will's eyes darted to livid new scar on the side of Crawford's neck, peeking above his shirt collar like a shy demon on his shoulder. "And…how are you?"

"Out of the glue, for the moment. But gratitude's got a short half-life."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant. I just don't want to answer it."

They fell into silence, as they often did. Jack's customary decibel level being what it was, Will thought the man remarkably adept at silence.

"What happened that night, Will?"

His timing, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired.

"I don't want to answer that, either."

"You know you'll have to, eventually. It's me now or someone worse later."

Will sighed; he shuddered and stretched, and grimaced at the resulting spasm of pain that seared across his abdomen like a hot iron band. Jack glanced at his morphine drip, but the button that would have given him a two-milligram bump of relief was stubbornly ignored. Jack hoped that was for clarity's sake, and not because Graham believed he deserved it.

"I found Alana on the porch," Will began. "Called for an ERT. She told me you were inside. I covered her with my jacket, drew my weapon, and went inside."

A long, preparatory pause was punctuated by a shaky breath.

"I found Abigail standing in the kitchen," Will said quickly, tearing off the plaster in a single sharp tug, gritting his teeth as the wound was exposed to air. Crawford could nearly see the memories being thrown against the screen behind his friend's eyes, a ruthlessly precise pageant of anguish and loss. "She said she didn't know what to do, and so she just…did what he told her."

A swell of anger crested and broke against the back of Jack's tongue, both for and at the Hobbs girl. For him, motive was a deductive tool, not a philosophical debate, and Abigail Hobbs had killed, helped to kill, and attempted to kill a known total of ten people. She was far from the innocent young woman upon whom Will Graham's paternal instincts had imprinted; but while she had chosen poorly, even Jack could admit that the options with which she'd been presented weren't any that an eighteen-year-old girl should have been made to choose between.

It galled him, after everything he'd dealt with, everything he'd seen, that the breathtaking indifference with which the world doled out unfair circumstances could still manage to so frequently land sucker punches between the narrow gaps of the plate armor that fortified his definitions of right and wrong.

"He grabbed me from behind," Will continued. "Plunged the knife into my gut. I dropped my gun, staggered, fell. And then he grabbed Abigail, and...finally finished what her father had started."

"Why wait until now?" Crawford asked. "Why not kill her months ago, when he made it look like you did it?"

Will stared down at his midsection, at the hidden laceration held together with staples and sutures beneath layers of bandages and cheap bleached cotton.

"She was his way of keeping the receipt," he said quietly, "in case he had to take the ring back."

"Abigail Hobbs...was a _marriage_ proposal?"

"Of sorts."

Jack blinked twice, but had better taste than to remark that he was glad Hannibal Lecter hadn't also sought to send Will a bouquet of Roses with a dozen different surnames.

"And somewhere in the middle of all this," he said instead, "you got your gun back."

"He wasn't expecting me to choose him, not after... He would've picked it up otherwise, or kicked it further away. Abigail was bleeding out on the floor right beside me -- we were bleeding together -- but instead of trying to help her, I crawled to my gun, and I shot him in the back."

"A helping hand wouldn't have saved Abigail Hobbs at that point. You made the right choice."

"I don't feel _righteous._ " Will sighed again and tilted his head back to rest against the pillow, trying to chart his location by the perforations in the gray cork ceiling panels in lieu of stars. "I'm done, Jack. When this is over...I'm leaving the Bureau."

His tone was underlined with a finality that Crawford knew better than to argue with -- for now.

"Kade Prurnell will be relieved to hear that. She's still spitting tacks that she didn't get to have us arrested. As if she's not happy as a pig in shit at the optics of having technically been party to the capture of 'the most notorious bogeyman the twenty-first century has thus far encountered,' to lift a phrase from Freddie Lounds."

Will snorted. "Pyrrhic victories all around, then."

"Entrapment of the Chesapeake Ripper's a pardonable offense, as long as he stays trapped. Which he's going to."

Graham looked doubtful.

"Abigail didn't die alone in that house, Jack. You, me, Alana. Hannibal, too. We all went with her. The rest of us just..." A humorless quirk of his mouth. "Took a wrong turn at Albuquerque."

"What are you trying to say, Will?"

Graham scrubbed a hand over the beard kept inexpertly trimmed by the hospital staff, rubbed at his sunken eyes with thumb and forefinger.

"I don't know. I don't know," he said. "I don't want to know. I'm tired, Jack. I don't… I'm just _tired._ "

Jack nodded. "Get some rest," he said, then regretted it, hearing how hackneyed it sounded, how hollow. "I'll be back tomorrow."

"Yeah. I'll be here."

* * *

Urban light pollution being what it was, the stars were lost to Bedelia as well, even with the onset of night and the benefit of a skylight.

She reclined in her bathtub, head pillowed on one upstretched arm, gazing at the black rectangle of space for some minutes before she traded one darkness for another, closing her eyes and allowing herself to slip beneath the surface of the water.

It was a comfort to her, the warm, tenebrous wet -- the closest a person could ever come, once born, to a return to the liquid safety of the womb.

The water was infused with sweet almond oil, but she could smell nothing of it now, as sealed off from her senses as she knew how to be, leaving her the clarity of her mind alone.

The memory palace ensconced within had grown more organically than Hannibal's own, so much so that she would have described it as being more curtilage than castle. Like him, she had been cultivating the internal expanse since childhood; unlike him, she hadn't realized for a number of years that there was both a name and a formal system for the method by which she instinctually organized her thoughts, and only after it was identified did she begin to deliberately revise the layout of her accumulated knowledge and experiences. Wild vines of emotion had been resolutely trellised, and new associations stacked between extant branches, until she'd achieved a vast Fallingwater of eclectically but strictly correlated recollections, with new information directed through the surrounding hedge maze of her perceptions, where each dead end was a door to the deck or room most befitting of housing the subject matter at hand.

From its highest point -- a tranquil aerie feathered with the slubbed cashmere texture of a childhood blanket and the cool, bubbly weight of her grandmother's pearls -- she could look down and observe the nodes and nexuses of different levels that did not appear, upon walking through them, to intersect.

It was not a perfect view, more impressionistic than detailed, but as an early warning system -- a crow's nest from which to spot an oncoming storm -- it had served her admirably well, she'd thought, with the sole exception of Neal Frank -- until, of course, that exception was revealed to have in fact been Hannibal Lecter.

She'd spent much of her self-imposed exile reviewing that lapse in her defenses, checking and rechecking both nodes and notes in an effort to pinpoint where the blue of that particular horizon had gone to gray -- until she considered the possibility that it hadn't.

Hannibal had not loosed Neal Frank upon her with the expectation that she'd be killed, nor had he simply been curious about what she would do. Helping her to rephrase the murder as self-defense had indebted her to him up to a point, yes, but that was merely a convenient side effect of his primary objective, and his ensuing refusal to accept her retirement was far more telling of his feelings toward her than the danger in which he had initially placed her.

Hannibal Lecter was a serial killer. Who other than a therapist in possession of an identical impulse could he trust to embody a mirror wherein his thoughts and feelings could be accurately reflected, even from behind his human veil?

Selfish. He was so, so selfish, the product of a lifetime of singularity.

She could relate to that, as well. Being smart spoiled a lot of things -- an affliction that had certainly factored into Hannibal's obsession with Will Graham.

How thrilling, to finally find another mind that appeared to keep up with one's own, even if the way in which it managed such a feat involved a dissociative state. How tempting it would be, to try to solidify that fluid state into something that could more than parrot phrases when its string was pulled, but properly converse, exchange, commiserate.

How lonely, to watch it crumble when one finally shattered the mold; to learn that it could take on but not indefinitely hold the shape of its container.

Hannibal liked to contain, to envelope; to unhinge his jaw and consume people whole, but even he had to swallow at some point.

Lungs aching, Bedelia resisted the instinct to gulp air, forcing herself to remain focused on her thoughts. She reread the oath and indenture she had sworn as a medical doctor, particularly its proscription against abortive pessaries that, as a young co-ed, had chafed her, but at present seemed to possess a grain of ancient wisdom that could be abstracted and distilled beyond the chauvinistic sentiments of an old dead Greek.

She rested a hand on her stomach, and felt the pulse of her abdominal aorta against her palm, the ticking seconds of a biological clock whose time she'd never cared to tell, apart from the aesthetical pleasure of putting together elegant little outfits to send her sister's children at Christmases and Easters.

For nine months, Hannibal's aspirations had incubated inside of Will Graham, but the result of that union had been stillborn.

Birthdays and rebirthdays. Revolutions and revelations. Reformations and redefinitions of life.

When she at last emerged from her bath, fingerprints puckered into obscurity, freshly appreciative of the lightheaded luxury of oxygen, Bedelia opened Hannibal Lecter's fine leather valise, and selected from its contents a Tom Ford button-up in powder blue Prince of Wales check.

She had to cuff the sleeves twice to keep her hands unimpeded, but the length was just right, the hem hitting her legs at mid-thigh.

She poured herself a glass of wine -- the last of the Château d'Yquem -- and sat in his chair as she savored its honeyed complexity well into the night, chewing over what was to be her patient's best course of treatment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Fallingwater](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fallingwater_-_DSC05639.JPG), designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I thought Bedelia's memory palace should be recognizably American as compared to Hannibal's, the New World to his Old. Also my Bedelia's a Yinzer (Pittsburgh being where they filmed both Silence of the Lambs and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, what could be more perfect?), so the house is something she would have been familiar with even before she began to formally study architecture. An early fascination with it definitely contributed to her choice of home in Baltimore later on.


	3. Proverbs of Hell

She wore one of his pocket squares today -- a sumptuous paisley of cream and olive green, knotted around her lithe neck in the style of a kerchief -- and carried with her a nondescript paper tote in one hand.

Hannibal looked curiously at both, nostrils flaring -- in pleasure at the one, and at the other, an attempt to discern its contents.

"Your shoes are much better than your bag today," he bantered.

Bedelia's answering smile was equal parts tolerant and mischievous as she plucked several plastic Tupperware containers from the tote, and set them in a neat row on the table between them.

Hannibal watched her hands as she pulled the lids off one by one, while Bedelia watched his eyes, clocking the fractional widening of his pupils with every pop, as suddenly and lustfully attentive as if she were undoing the buttons of her blouse.

"Out of the eater, something to eat: Anatolian figs, truffled _pâté de foie gras,_ Golden Osetra caviar, _crème fraîche,_ and dark rye toast points. I also brought a thermos of Saint-Estèphe, but the acting director informed me that all alcoholic beverages are considered contraband." The lifting of one perfectly-groomed eyebrow and a slight pursing of her lips were enough to clearly broadcast her opinion of that particular prohibition.

Hannibal raised his eyes to hers, uncertain. She would, he thought, know better than to taunt him, even in here -- especially in here. Worse than dangerous, it would be, frankly, tacky, and Bedelia Du Maurier was not, had never been, a tacky woman.

The orderlies here were often tacky, and the acting director tackiest of all, demanding random searches of his cell at deliberately inopportune times, finding the most enjoyment in disrupting him in the middle of a bowel movement. He was, of course, no more shamed by this than a lion is by the tourists who gawp and bang at the walls of its enclosure, but how puzzling it would be to find a lioness among them, her big paws streaking the glass.

His misgivings were allayed when, at the last, she extracted from the bag a long plastic spoon, and rested its bowl end on one of the containers' discarded lids.

"Come to sup with the Devil, Doctor?" he asked.

"To lunch with him, technically. They tell me you've been eating very little."

"I eat enough. I would eat more if what they served could be accurately defined as food."

"Themselves, for instance?"

Hannibal's brow lifted, somewhat wistful.

She gestured at the spoon. "If you would not find it an indignity…?"

"Not at all. But it is rude to eat in front of one who does not."

Bedelia picked up one of the figs and bit into it, lips wrapping around the pale green bulb, meeting his gaze the same as she had when he had been the one to show up at her place of residence with a plate of marrow bones and roses.

"Better?"

"Much." The word caught on the back of his tongue, and he discretely cleared his throat. "Thank you."

She placed the other half of the fig on the spoon, and guided it with a steady hand to his mouth.

Hannibal closed his eyes, tasting the fruit, perhaps tasting her on the fruit, her lipstick and teeth and tongue and skin, as close to a kiss as they'd come in nearly two years, and they continued their session between mutual bites of sound and sustenance.

"The sharing of food is a custom ripe with meaning," he noted. "A double-edged blade of sacred hospitality and obligation. To eat the food of the Underworld disallows one's ability to leave it; the same is true in the realm of the Fae."

"And yet I was able to flee after you fed me, and when our time today is up, I will be the one walking through the gates and out the front door. You brought the food, Hannibal, but it was in my house that we dined. My realm."

"And now you bring the food, and we lunch in mine." His face lowered, he fixed her with a look of wryly rakish allure. "People will say we're in love."

Bedelia tilted her head, her smile falling well short of her eyes. "Rebound relationships are notoriously precarious affairs, subject to rapid erosion. My role as your psychiatrist is to provide your life with an element of stability."

"An element of stability," he echoed. "The most stable elements on the periodic table are located between iron and silver. Between iron and silver: I think that is appropriate for you."

"You crave stability, Hannibal. Symmetry, harmony, balanced equations. The world will not be any other way within reach of your arm." She let her eyes linger for a beat on his straitjacket. "But not all impositions of order beget results that are congruent with the geometry of our natural habitats. Sometimes they stymy us, twist us out of shape, lower the ceilings of our lives."

"Many would call my shape innately twisted."

"While your glass may be smoked and crazed, your mentality is far from the artificial fog and distorted reflections to be found in carnival mirror mazes."

"Quid pro quo, Doctor Du Maurier: did you feel twisted on the day of your attack? Stymied by the order you imposed?"

"The mirror of my own mentality is, to refer back to your observation, silver-backed. What I felt was…fettered…by the potential consequences of what -- and who -- I had chosen to reflect."

"Consequences you avoided. With my help."

"That would depend on the consequences in question."

"You lowered your own ceiling when you retired."

"I did not retire entirely. Also with your help."

She looked again at the food. She could, they both knew, simply break a toast point in half, and fix it on the spoon atop a small portion of crème fraîche and caviar. He could not lunge further than the reach of his neck, and she'd been strongly cautioned to let her hands get no nearer to his mouth than the length of the plastic utensil.

She glanced at the narrow window in the door, and found it empty of onlookers.

"Can I trust you?" she asked, her tone bordering on rhetorical.

He shrugged, inasmuch as he was able. "I could ask you the same. After all, the last time your hand was in the vicinity of another's mouth, it did not end so well for him."

" _Touché._ "

Bedelia picked up a toast point and topped it with a small dollop of crème fraîche and a cluster of caviar beads, then stood and leant forward across the table.

Hannibal obediently opened his mouth and took a bite, sharp teeth lightly scraping her fingertips before they both pulled slowly back, her hand whole and unharmed, his throat containing nothing but elaborations of bread, buttermilk, and sturgeon roe.

Bedelia watched the bob of his Adam's apple as he swallowed, and when she fed him the other half, the pad of her thumb brushed the border of his bottom lip (she told herself) accidentally.

* * *

The click of a camera shutter drew Bedelia's attention as she crossed the parking lot on her way to her car, paper tote and (much nicer) handbag she'd been made to leave in the coatroom both clutched in one hand.

"I beg your pardon?" she demanded.

A redhead with perfect corkscrew curls, dressed in garish python print, lowered her DSLR with a shrug.

"You and everyone else. I'm afraid it's not in my nature to be pardonable."

Recognition dawned at once. What had Hannibal termed this woman? Ah, yes: a beadle of the church of human savagery. "Freddie Lounds. Shouldn't you be at Johns Hopkins, ignoring Will Graham's reasonable right to privacy?"

Freddie's simper didn't even attempt authenticity. "It's always nice to meet a fan. But I'm afraid you have me at a rare disadvantage, Miss…?"

"Why do you care to know my name?"

"So I can let everybody else know it, obviously -- who you are, and especially who you are to him."

"To whom?"

"Do we really need to play this game? I saw you talking to Jack Crawford on the steps the other day. There's only one person in there he'd be talking about right now."

"Then I suggest you direct your questions to Jack Crawford. Good day, Miss Lounds."

"You're only delaying the inevitable, you know," Freddie called after her, as Bedelia slipped into the blessedly mute refuge of her Jaguar, and started the ignition.

* * *

Lemuel Paulson, devout schizophrenic, matricidal maniac, and Hannibal Lecter's nearest neighbor, sang _Give of Your Best to the Master_ with the ardent repetition of the true believer.

Hannibal Lecter, lying supine on his cot, arms folded behind his head, hummed a baritone accompaniment, underscoring Lemmie's hoarsely-shrieked melody first in iambic, then trochaic meter, switching back and forth between verses, hard-soft, soft-hard.

> _Give of your best to the Master;_  
>  _Give of the strength of your youth;_  
>  _Throw your soul's fresh, glowing ardor_  
>  _Into the battle for truth..._

He stared up at the domed ceiling of the Palatine Chapel in his mind, where the mosaic of Christ Pantocrator gave him His back, fingers crossed behind, like a child telling a fib.

 _Can I trust you?_ Bedelia's voice bounced off the sanctuary's walls, seeming to come from the mouths of every angel and evangelist depicted therein. A curious question, for surely she had proven herself to be made of smarter stuff than that.

If he was perfectly honest with himself, Hannibal could not say with any real certainty whether he had gone to her home that night with the wholehearted intent to kill her, fractured though that heart had been by being jilted. He could admit, at least, that he'd been relieved not to need to -- relieved that he had not misjudged her worthiness, but rather his own ability to predict her.

It had been she, after all, who had first helped him define what what he wanted from a friendship, from a relationship -- she whose lines and walls had made evident, by contrast, his own hitherto unimaginable desire to be crossed and climbed.

Excepting the night of her attack, she had always carefully maintained the demarcations between intimacies she found permissible and those she did not, and Hannibal, although disappointed, was far too gentlemanly to press the issue. It was, perhaps, the sole boundary he categorically respected.

Perhaps things might have gone differently, had having her the once, in the wake of their patient's death and the bumbling probes of the police, not been so staggeringly transcendent an experience; had it not so far surpassed the bounds of the pleasures he had taken in the dewy-eyed ingénues and strapping young beaux of his earlier, much more superficial amatory conquests. Her exquisite beauty, the fluctuating pliability and authority of her demeanor, the intoxicating scent and bright, brackish taste of her cunt… A night in her arms had left him feeling seventeen again, brimming with the fresh miracle of love that was to be found in the bed and body of an uncommonly elegant woman at her most unadulterated.

And upon waking the next morning, she had run from it -- from herself, and from him. They'd both run, his two favorite people, thirty years apart: one all the way back to Hiroshima, the other to a chair across a room that felt equally as remote.

He wondered now if that refrain hadn't been the inception of his present plight -- not Will Graham himself, but the point in Hannibal's life at which he'd met the man, at the tail end of something that was supposed to have been a beginning, with a reopened and oversalted wound rendered again susceptible to infection. He really ought to have considered earlier the patchy wisdom of attempting to bandage it with a man who was a walking, talking personification of an autoimmune disease -- in hindsight, the encephalitis had bordered on being a gauchely heavy-handed omen of things to come. _C'est la vie._

In any case, he had done to Will what his sense of gallantry had not allowed him to do to Bedelia, but there could be no building of a family by force in a home where abandonment was baked into the bricks. A feast must present itself -- Hannibal knew that better than anyone, and he had been, if not content, then resigned to die as he had so often dined: alone, but for those who preferred the mask to the monster.

And then, the most extraordinary thing had occurred: for whatever reason, or lack thereof, his death had failed to materialize; instead, he was wrenched off the precipice and dropped into the lesser abyss of sleep, and what he'd discovered there was this:

_Treading water between the currents of anaesthetic and agony, a shining beacon winked at him from a cliff overlooking the jagged reef of his internal disarray -- not a lighthouse, but a figure draped in white, like a statue occulted by a drop cloth, save for a golden crown that reflected the sun in mimicry of a harvest moon. He had the sense, despite the figure's facelessness, that it could see his struggle plainly, and that in seeing him, it desired to be seen in turn._

_The wind picked up, whipping the sea into a frenzy, flecking the waves with foam, as on the lips of a rabid animal. Hannibal threshed to keep afloat, his gaze devoted solely to the figure on the cliff, whose white veil rippled in the gusts, rippled until, with one great aeolian sigh, it was peeled away completely._

_Bedelia, he realized; Bedelia, of course. Concomitantly the provider of his solace and author of his injury, Bedelia, standing lunar and lambent, blushful and beckoning, atop the salvific escarpment of a synaptic Naxos..._

Her face became focal point by which he'd managed to orientate his position to the shore, and her name the plaintive anthem of his SOS. Whether or not she would heed his cries had been neither here nor there, at the time. He had spent time in silence before, save for one name spoken -- screamed -- in his sleep; a name that, for many years now, had screamed his own name back to him only in dreams. He was more prepared than not for this one to be no different.

But like a proverb, like a dove in the evening bearing a freshly-plucked olive leaf in her beak, she had indeed taken flight, and risked the waves to return to him; had today even perched upon his finger with feast quite literally in hand.

The irony of it all struck him like a slab of rubble from a collapsing church, and Hannibal smiled in rueful appreciation at the barbed eloquence of fate.

He let a swell of grief wash over him, and then let it recede. There was terra firma to be won past the breakers, if he kept a sharp lookout, and was patient -- _her_ patient, in particular, for as long as the courts would consent, which they would do indefinitely, if his lawyer argued as well as Hannibal paid him. All good things to those who wait, and none could wait with better grace than he.

Hannibal curled onto his side and closed his eyes, and found sleep between the lyrics of a madman's lullaby.

> _Laid down His life without murmur,_  
>  _You from sin's ruin to save;_  
>  _Give Him your heart's adoration;_  
>  _Give Him the best that you have..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lemmie, as I'm sure Harris fans surmised, is a more articulate stand-in for Sammie, Lemuel being a form of Samuel, and Paulson a nod to Lennie Small from Of Mice and Men.
> 
> Hannibal smudges a little Keats around the edges of his "dream" about Bedelia, specifically a little Ode to a Nightingale, and he'll probably do so again.


	4. Songs of Innocence

Alana Bloom had always been a staunch critic of capital punishment. She'd even smugly toasted its abolishment in Maryland in 2013, lauding the victory of compassion over violence while she'd sipped from a pilsner glass of beer spiked with the blood a murder victim.

Now, she would have pledged the hypothetical life of her firstborn child in exchange for the state's reestablishment of the needle. She wondered if that had something to do with the amount of bone marrow that had recently been introduced into her bloodstream -- change of blood, change of heart, change of mind.

"He _can't_ be allowed to go prison. They don't know what he is, they wouldn't know what they're dealing with."

"It's not like he'd be put in gen pop. Super max would take the same precautions he's under now -- isolation, restraints when he's out of his cell, access to nothing more dangerous than a cup of Jell-O."

"And if, God forbid, he ever becomes eligible for parole? Or if they expand his privileges for good behavior, give him access to less secure areas -- to other inmates? At least at BSHCI, his every move would be contingent upon the opinion of a man whose reflection reminds him every day of exactly what Hannibal Lecter is capable of."

"Chesapeake Correctional isn't a charm school, Doctor Bloom, and more importantly, BSHCI isn't justice. If he gets off on insanity, that's dozens of families who will have it forever hanging over their heads that the man who killed and consumed the people they loved was found to be not guilty in the eyes of the law."

" _Screw the law,_ Jack! You had no problem breaking it to cage him the first place; now you want to gamble on who gets the key?"

" _He needs to go down as guilty._ "

"Does he? Or is that what _you_ need?"

Crawford's glare had never intimidated Alana as it did his subordinates, and it didn't start now.

"I ate them, too, Jack," she reminded him. "They're keeping me pumped full of Zofran because it's too physically dangerous for me to vomit, but I feel sick every time I think about it, and I think about it all the time. But Hannibal being found not guilty is the surest way to keep anyone else from ever ending up on the menu."

"It's perjury, is what it is."

"It's the lowest-risk scenario."

"Judicial definitions of sanity almost never align with psychiatric ones, Doctor Bloom, you _know_ that--"

"Yes, I do, and so does he! He is _banking_ on his own conviction, Jack. We can't play into his hand."

Crawford sighed heavily through his nose, mouth pursed. He stood up and went to the sink, filled a paper cup with tap water and fished two Alka-Seltzer tablets from his suit coat pocket, dropped them in and downed the concoction like a shot when they'd dissolved.

He was still facing the sink when he spoke, his hands clutching the counter the way they often did his desk, as if to reassure himself of his own stolid authority.

"Frankly, the idea of diminished capacity being even remotely applicable to Hannibal Lecter is enough to make me question _my_ sanity."

"You know him," Alana said quietly. "A jury doesn't. Every key witness for the prosecution in this case has the combined credentials in criminology and psychology to burrow under any cogent theory of mind and subvert it. We don't have to objectively prove that Hannibal's insane; we just have to fail to convince twelve people that he's not.

"At least talk to them, Jack. Talk to Will, talk to Chilton and Du Maurier -- or have them talk to me."

He sighed again, and crushed the paper cup in his hand before tossing it in the wastebasket.

"…If -- _if_ \-- we do this, if everyone agrees, I'm going need something from you in return."

"Name it."

"If Hannibal Lecter is to remain in the custody of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, I'm gonna need a better assurance than Frederick Chilton that he'll remain there."

Alana's stomach lurched as if she was falling again, through rain and glass and the terrific certainty that she was going to die.

"Me," she said.

"You," he confirmed. "Whatever you have to do to get them, I want those keys in _your_ hands, Doctor Bloom."

She swallowed against the phantom taste of blood in her mouth.

"Agreed."

* * *

The crocodile strap of his vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso was, naturally, far too large for her wrist, even buckled at its tightest hole.

She got around this obstacle by wearing it Gianni Agnelli-style over the sleeve of her blazer -- a blue and red weave of Chanel tweed, the bulk of which balanced the watch's art deco angles and obviously masculine face, and leant the look as a whole a cleverly subtle androgyny that emphasized the fine bones of her hands as she unpacked the day's comestibles (sheep milk cheese and tomato tarts topped with fresh herbs, and vanilla-roasted rhubarb and strawberries that shared both the color and bright zest of blood).

"Doctor Alana Bloom," she announced, "is advocating for the prosecution to throw the match."

"Are you speaking of combustibles, or games of skill?"

"That remains to be seen. Doctor Bloom is convinced that a conventional prison would afford you too many opportunities for mischief. She believes it would be safer for everyone, the general public included, if you were to remain incarcerated here."

"She's quite right, too. How wise of Alana."

"You always said she was one of your brightest pupils."

"Indeed I did. Keeping her in the dark was the effort of many long nights."

Bedelia thought of the younger woman's big, limpid eyes and dark, glossy hair, and raised a brow. "Not too much of an effort, surely."

Hannibal smiled. "No, not too much. But I would not have chosen to be with Alana had the circumstances not been what they were."

"The federal sharks had begun to well and truly circle."

"Among other things."

"You value women differently than you do men -- provided, of course, that they've demonstrated the requisite level of civility to be considered such. Your invasions of them are comparatively gentle, almost apologetic; like a burglar who replaces every item he steals with vase of flowers. You felt protective of Doctor Bloom, as you felt protective of me."

"As I still feel, of you."

"Falling under your protection is not without its own risks."

"Risks that you negotiated with prudent aplomb."

"You lead the blind on condition that they willingly remain so. Like Cupid and Psyche: light the lamp, and love flees."

"Love flees, and the soul searches."

"Have you been soul-searching, Hannibal?"

"For love?"

"You tell me."

Hannibal thought for a moment, allowing a delicate flake of puff pastry to melt on his tongue, rich and light at once. "Apuleius wrote that Psyche searched for Cupid, but it was he who returned to her, when her curiosity again got the better of her, and in attempting to absorb a little of Proserpine's undiluted beauty, she was instead overcome by the Stygian sleep."

"Cupid loved her too much to forsake her, despite the more dangerous aspects of her nature."

"He pled their case to the gods, moving even Venus to pity, and Psyche was granted immortality, so that love and the soul could be forever intertwined."

"Did Cupid plead insanity, too?"

" _Amour fou?_ Alas, Apuleius doesn't specify."

"Perhaps that's for the best. To rely on Apuleius for legal counsel might well make a Golden Ass of you."

"Still trying to protect your patient from himself, Doctor?"

"I've always tried to protect you, from many things."

"Will Graham. The FBI. My own capacity for reckless whimsy."

Bedelia said nothing, and Hannibal might have taken her silence for agreement had she fixed him with one of her isn't-it-obvious half-smiles -- but she didn't, and it wasn't. She kept her eyes rooted to the strawberries, and the flippant analysis poised on the back of Hannibal's tongue faltered and fell back into his throat. He blinked, and tilted his head to the other side, a physical shift in perspective that mirrored an internal one.

"And...from yours," he realized, at last lighting upon the answer to a question that had been plaguing him for nearly two years -- an answer so rudimentary that, had the wound not landed so near the scar of his aunt's rejection, he would have immediately discerned the difference between the two. "That's why you rebuffed me after your attack. Why you redrew the line between us, and guarded it so resolutely. It wasn't fear; it was clemency."

"As ridiculous as it now sounds," she admitted, "you must understand, all I knew then was that you were my patient -- and that I'd just killed another one. And that I took pleasure in the act of killing him."

Hannibal recalled the advice she had given him months ago: "You felt the urge the move forward, and so you took a step back."

Bedelia watched her fingers flex and fold together, as if by their movements she could open and close the valve of her voice.

"The night of my attack, after..."' A delicate sidestep, "you comforted me, I laid awake for a long time, watching you sleep. You looked so…unassuming. Vulnerable. I laid a hand on your chest, over your heart, and I fantasized about what it would feel like to reach inside of you and… _squeeze_ …until it stopped beating."

"And in that moment, you decided that all you could do was watch."

"When I understood what you were doing with Will Graham," she continued, "I understood better what you had wanted from me. I felt as though your disregard for my reluctance to join your ill-advised dance with the FBI was punishment for my refusal to act further on my instincts, and on my feelings for you. I resented that, deeply."

Hannibal sorted this, sieved it, plucked its gold from the pan. "Resentment is a companion emotion to envy, or jealousy. If you envied me the freedom with which I danced, you would have resented my actions with many patients who came before Will Graham. It sounds rather as if you were jealous of my actions with Will in particular -- that it was not the dance itself, but my choice of partner that offended you."

"I had no interest in your actions with Will Graham beyond the dangers in which they placed you -- and, by extension, me."

"You were interested enough to visit him here, before you left."

A tiny smile, only just regretful enough to avoid being classed as a sneer, tugged at the corners of Bedelia's mouth. "Now who sounds jealous?"

Hannibal wet his lips and averted his eyes, but didn't deny her words with anything more strident than a quiet sigh.

"What a strange equilibrium we've reached," he mused. "In this Stygian sleep of buckles and bars, I am as safe from you as you are from me, and all either of us can do is watch."

His gaze settled on her left wrist, and she thumbed a corner of his Reverso's stainless steel case, the material emblematic of the city of her birth, with uses ranging from building materials and surgical tools to kitchen appliances and instrument strings.

"You wear the remains of my former life like a second skin, just as I made a second home of yours: an exchange as fluid and intimate as any we have ever shared in seven years of therapy sessions. What do you make of that?"

"A sustainable fashion choice."

"Ethics become aesthetics," he agreed, and then nodded to the watch. "The case is flippable, by the way. That's why it's called the Reverso. One side allows you to observe the time, and the other enables you to go about your business while time's back is turned."

"Or, at the very least, to protect your public face from whatever damage such business may incur. If only you had been wearing it the night of your apprehension."

"If only."

"We cannot turn time's back anymore than we can turn back time, Hannibal. The closest we can ever come to either is a second chance -- or, if our choices remain the same, _déjà vu._ "

"And in the interim, we wait for the world to loop once more around the sun, until some of our stars are the same again. Your stars will soon be much the same as they were on the day you were born: tell me, have you given any further thought as to how you will mark the occasion?"

"Not really. I take it you have a suggestion?"

A moment passed -- three heartbeats, perhaps four -- before his eyes at last shifted from her hands to her throat to her face.

"We cannot rewind time," he began, "but we can buy it, borrow it, serve it; the worst, by far, is to waste it. My suggestion would be that you take a little of it for yourself: a relaxing weekend away in a warmer climate, perhaps. Miami Beach is lovely this time of year, and the Keys are not to be missed."

Bedelia almost laughed. Of all the places with which she either knew or could imagine Hannibal Lecter to be acquainted, a billion-dollar sandbar and the birthplace of Burger King did not readily present itself as a possibility -- but in that respect, it made perfect sense: he could always be counted upon to embody the exception that proved the rule.

"I'll consider it," she said.

"Please do. You'll feel like a new woman. I promise."

* * *

Paranoia and painkillers make for strange and shallow sleep. Blurry doctors and nurses in lab coats and scrubs tended to morph, in moments of partial lucidity, into a man in a rumpled white shirt stained with gore, or a young woman whimpering an apology before lurching toward her. Alana startled every time, jerked and then gasped as the halo keeping her pelvis immobile wrenched against her bones, sending hot wires of pain through her back and down her legs that took several seconds' careful breathing to get a handle on.

Exhaling slowly, she opened her eyes to syrupy evening light, and, after a few moments, the primal, skin-tightening apprehension that something was watching her from the muzzy shadows just beyond it.

"Who's there?" she called, albeit barely, her voice hoarsened by cottonmouth.

A crimson figure on the periphery of her vision detached from the doorway and moved forward, and in the haze of Dilaudid and exhaustion on the heels of her conversation with Jack, Alana felt surreally certain that the masqued Red Death had indeed come to call on her.

It wasn't until the figure was standing at her bedside, close enough for clarity, that the phantom resolved into a woman of about thirty, baby-faced but with incongruously sharp blue butcher's eyes, wearing an ensemble that might have been plucked directly out of a Klimt painting: an angular red pantsuit with a thick statement necklace like a collar of slatted gold.

"I didn't mean to wake you," the woman said with a one-shouldered shrug. "I was just…taking inventory. Your face came out a hell of a lot prettier than my brother's, not that that's a high bar to overcome."

"Your brother?"

"Mason. --Verger." There was a strange cadence to her voice, a dreaminess that bordered on dissociative, as though she were in a state of perpetual surprise that she could speak at all; every other sentence sounded like an afterthought.

Alana clocked the name immediately. "Then you would be Margot."

"I would."

Alana swallowed dryly, felt for the reassuring shape of the call button under her right hand. She didn't get a particularly threatening vibe off of Margot, but one could never predict the ways in which a victim's family members might lash out, or at whom.

"I was sorry to hear about what happened to your brother," she hedged. It wasn't a total lie -- she was sorry that Will had witnessed it, and, almost moreso, that his dogs had been made to partake.

Another shrug. "I'm not. The hospital staff are all touched by my devotion, that I spend all my free time by his side, but the truth is I've never been happier to see him. I think he's never looked better, or more like himself."

Alana relaxed a little. She gestured with her chin to the styrofoam cup of flat ginger ale on the bedside table. "Would you mind?"

Margot picked up the cup and guided the straw to Alana's lips.

"Thank you. It's satisfying when the outside matches the inside. It gives one the illusion of justice."

"I don't care about justice, Doctor Bloom. Only survival."

"Then we have something in common."

"I imagine we have a lot in common. I actually stopped by to see Will Graham, but he was…indisposed. I just happened to recognize your name on the board as I passed the nurses' station -- from the news." Margot's eyes skipped down Alana's bare stomach, settled on the halo. "Looks like you have a long road ahead of you."

"Looks like."

"You know, Muskrat Farm has a full gym. And a pool -- indoor, heated. You're welcome to make use of both later on in your recovery."

"That's...very generous of you."

"They're redoing parts of the house to accommodate Mason's, ah, _special needs._ I'm sure any needs you have could be accommodated as well."

"Are you hitting on me, Margot?"

"Not yet. Right now, I'm commiserating. You've just been through a traumatic experience. I'm not unfamiliar with traumatic experiences."

"I appreciate your concern, but I don't need a shoulder to cry on."

"I have a bum shoulder, anyway. Think about it, though. Seriously. I don't often get the chance, but I can be a good friend. I cook. --Vegetarian. A side effect of early exposure to slaughterhouses."

"A little early exposure might have done me some good, too, in hindsight."

"No argument there." Margot plucked a business card from the black silk neckline of her blouse and set it on the table beside Alana's cup. "My number, should that long road get lonely."

She receded from the room with the same torpid grace with which she'd arrived -- like a gentle flood, Alana thought, as the current of unconsciousness carried her once more towards sleep; like the gradually warming water in a stockpot full of frogs...

* * *

  
Shortly after he'd left Alana, Crawford had phoned Du Maurier, and left a message for Chilton to call him at his earliest convenience. Then, he'd stopped home to see Bella, and watched her sleep for a while. He'd made himself a sandwich of cold cuts and spring greens, and then a pot of coffee to take with him in a thermos, so that he wouldn't have to drink hospital swill. He ran an electric razor over the five o'clock shadow he'd been sporting for three consecutive five o'clocks, and brushed his teeth, and splashed his face with cold water, hoping to dissolve the sticky tendrils of an uncharacteristic timidity that held him fast to the passing minutes, stalling his fulfillment of a task he very much did not want to perform.

It was nearly dusk by the time he pulled back into the hospital parking garage, but his own self-disgust had him gaining inertia by the time the automatic doors swished open to admit him. He was back to his usual stride when reached the elevators, and almost impatient once finally within one, pushing the fourth-floor button thrice, as if that would hasten its ascent.

He flashed his badge to the guards standing sentry outside of Graham's room, and found its occupant conscious and relatively clear-eyed, sipping broth from a plastic mug.

"Evening, Jack," Will said, sounding neither surprised not pleased to see him. "If you're here to join me for dinner, I'm sure the nurses could rustle up a spare bouillon cube."

"No, thanks, but we'll do a shot of applesauce when you've graduated to soft foods."

"Think you could sneak in a shot of whiskey alongside it? Or a whole bottle?"

"You're gonna want one even more in about five minutes."

Will's eyebrows tilted up in a way that reminded Jack of one of his dogs -- the brindle mutt he called Winston, canny and sad -- and he made a note in the back of his mind to find out what all was involved in getting an animal a service license, or at least emotional support status, that would permit its presence in the building. Will functioned better when he had something simple to take care of, and that simply took care of him in turn.

That small mercy decided, Jack launched directly into Alana's proposal for the handling of Hannibal Lecter's trial and subsequent incarceration. He wanted to look away, ashamed, when Will's face twisted and ticced as he grappled with the soundness of her reasoning and the kick in the fucking teeth it was to any shred of vindication Lecter's capture might have afforded him; he wanted to, but he forced himself to look anyway, and give his friend's pain the respect and empathy it deserved.

When he'd finished, Will was quiet for a long moment, and Jack was beginning to wonder if his response wasn't some sort of shell-shock, catatonia, when Will set his mug aside and loosed a long, unsteady breath.

"It's the third line of a tercet," Will said at last. "It has to rhyme with the first. Our job is to craft his innocence..."

"…just as he crafted your guilt."

"With painstaking attention to detail and no small amount of poetic irony."

"You're not obligated to write it." The assurance sounded hollow even to Jack's ears, and he felt he deserved the scorn with which Will met his eyes in response.

"Of course I am," Will said, seething, so much so Jack halfway expected steam to hiss out of his pores in the sterile chill of the hospital room; heard it, even, in the sibilants of his next sentence, stretched thin: "This is our design."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fiddled a bit with season two, re: Mason's ridiculously rapid recovery at home. I never liked that scene, it always felt like it had been awkwardly wedged in, and somehow even less believable than the majority of ornate murder tableaus accomplished under a time crunch, so here he's still quite thoroughly incapacitated and on life support.
> 
> I also shamelessly stole the idea for Hannibal's watch from a blogspot called Hello, Tailor that I thought made really excellent points about the character's sense of elegance.


End file.
